There are a wide variety of computer mediated persistent conversations, such as those that arise in various networked computer contexts, including Usenet (NNTP) newsgroups, World Wide Web (HTTP) message board or bulletin board sites, email lists, chat rooms, multi-user dungeons (MUDs), multi-user games and graphical virtual worlds, etc. These computer mediated persistent conversations are used singly and in concert to create an increasing number of social cyberspaces, groups, or communities that allow groups of people to gather on-line and interact with each other.
While such computer mediated persistent conversations are becoming increasingly popular, there are a number of problems and difficulties facing the users of such media. The interaction context, or information, about the kind of space, group, and activity taking place in these media are frequently missing or ambiguous. This makes finding groups to participate in and people to interact with difficult. The history and structure of groups often become apparent only after extended participation. As a result, many of these media remain complex and confusingly tangled spaces in which it is difficult for users to navigate and participate.
One example of such an interaction medium or environment is Usenet, which is a collection of messages, referred to as posts, available through the Network News Transport Protocol (NNTP). The posts available through NNTP are organized into newsgroups that are named according to a hierarchical name convention. At the highest level there are numerous general categories, such as rec, comp, alt, sci, etc., that identify the general subject (i.e., recreation, computer, alternative, science, etc.) of a set of newsgroups. Additional terms are added hierarchically to uniquely define a newsgroup within a collection of others (e.g., comp.lang.perl.misc or rec.pets.misc, kids.pregnancy).
Public, online social spaces like Usenet newsgroups are frequently noisy and voluminous places. Larger groups regularly receive more than ten thousand messages a month; many of these messages being of limited value. Despite the many advantages groups of people gain when they interact through computer networks, enough poor-quality messages flood newsgroups and similar public discussions that finding the valuable content typically proves too difficult to be worthwhile.
Efforts to address this issue have primarily focused on methods for groups of people to share their opinions of the messages and authors contributing content to a social cyberspace. These techniques, used by Web sites like online auctioneer eBay.com and Linux news provider Slashdot.org, face the dual challenges of attracting a critical mass of people willing to contribute evaluations and ensuring the quality of those evaluations. Even when they meet these dual challenges, conventional network sites have not succeeded in using the information to reduce the noise and prevent the abuse that often prevail in online public spaces. The rampant misuse of these common spaces is one of the reasons many people who once used Usenet no longer do so.
Therefore, an aspect of the present invention is a determination that explicit participation or feedback of users may not be required to assess other users as to which authors and messages are valuable. This invention can automatically bring to online spaces or communities social context and interactional history that can help users evaluate other users.
In one implementation, the present invention provides information about the histories of the authors or users in a computer mediated persistent conversation, such as a newsgroup. The information can include how long a user has been active in the group, in what other newsgroups the user participates, to what other threads of conversation the user contributes, and which other users or participants the user most often engages in discussion. This information may be obtained as an aggregation of data that is obtained from the groups or communities automatically. The information about any selected user or group is then made available or otherwise provided to any other users so that they can decide whether the selected user or group is likely to provide helpful or useful information.
In an alternative implementation, particular message type indicators may be applied to messages when they are posted. The message type indicators may also be obtained as an aggregation of data obtained from the groups or communities automatically. The message type indicators may be made available, either alone or with any other information about any selected user or group, so that other users can decide whether the selected user or group is likely to provide helpful or useful information.
Additional objects and advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the detailed description of the preferred embodiment thereof, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.